Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 80

During a long famine in Magadha, Bhadrabahu led a body of monks south to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka while Sthulabhadra stayed in the north and convened a council at Pataliputra.

Because early sculptors at Sanchi and Bharhut did not show the Buddha in human form, they used signs, and the wheel stands for the first sermon at Sarnath, which is itself called the turning of the wheel of law.

He presided over the First Buddhist Council, held at Rajgriha soon after the Mahaparinirvana in the reign of Ajatashatru, whose purpose was to settle the teaching before it could be distorted.

Mahavira preached in the spoken tongue of Magadha, and the twelve Angas that preserve his teaching are in Ardhamagadhi. They were finally written down at the second Jain council held at Vallabhi in Gujarat under Devardhi Kshamashramana.

It is the Jain teaching that every object has countless aspects and that no single judgement can capture the whole truth.

The Buddha attained enlightenment seated under a peepal tree at Bodh Gaya, and the tree is therefore called the Bodhi tree; in early Buddhist art, where the Buddha was never shown in human form, the tree itself stands for the enlightenment.

After twelve years of severe austerity Mahavira attained kaivalya at the age of forty-two under a sal tree at Jrimbhikagrama, on the bank of the river Rijupalika, and from that moment was known as Jina and Kevalin.

Held in the reign of Ashoka under the presidency of Moggaliputta Tissa, it purged the order of dissenters, added the Abhidhamma Pitaka, the philosophical third basket, to the canon, and decided to send missionaries to Sri Lanka and other lands.

Parshvanatha had prescribed four restraints, and Mahavira added celibacy to them, so Jain monastic discipline rests on five great vows: ahimsa, satya, asteya, aparigraha and brahmacharya.

He was the twenty-third Tirthankara, a prince of Varanasi and son of King Ashvasena, whose emblem is the serpent. He is placed about two hundred and fifty years before Mahavira and gave his followers four vows: non-violence, truth, non-stealing and non-possession.

The Fourth Buddhist Council met at Kundalvana in Kashmir in the first century CE under the Kushana king Kanishka, with Vasumitra presiding and Ashvaghosha assisting him.

After his enlightenment the Buddha walked to the deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi and taught the Four Noble Truths to the five ascetics who had earlier deserted him.

The words, meaning truth alone triumphs, were adopted as the national motto and are inscribed below the state emblem of India in Devanagari script.

A horse was set free to wander for a year, guarded by the king's soldiers; every territory it crossed unchallenged was counted as accepting his overlordship, and the animal was then sacrificed with great ceremony.

Iron appears only in the later Vedic period, and the axes and ploughshares made from it allowed the forests of the Ganga-Yamuna doab to be cleared, which is why this single word carries so much historical weight.

The correct answer is C, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who argued in his book The Arctic Home in the Vedas that the Vedic hymns preserve memories of long days and long nights, which he took as evidence of an Arctic origin.

The whole of the ninth mandala consists of hymns to Soma, at once a plant, the drink pressed from it and the god of that drink, which shows how central the soma offering was to Vedic sacrifice.

The early Vedic people were mainly pastoral and grew little, and the one grain their hymns name repeatedly is barley, used both as food and in offerings.

The phrase is quoted so often in examinations because it fixes both the names of the assemblies and the text they are described in.

The Rigveda praises it as the naditama, the best or holiest of rivers, and treats it as a goddess as well as a stream.